Three years ago on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas carried out a deadly pogrom against Jews in Israel, financed and backed by the reactionary rulers in Tehran. Hamas thugs swept across the border from Gaza, hunting down and murdering 1,200 people, overwhelmingly Jewish civilians. This included residents of kibbutzim and other communities in the area, as well as hundreds attending the Nova music festival.
The pogromists also wounded thousands, raped and mutilated dozens of women and took more than 250 hostages back to Gaza, where they faced intimidation and torture. It took two years before the last of the living hostages were released.
Hamas also killed, brutalized or took hostage several dozen migrant workers from Thailand, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, as well as a number of Israeli Arabs. Hamas considers these workers a legitimate target simply because they associate with Jews.
After it was formed out of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas adopted a covenant explicitly proclaiming its goal as the destruction of Israel and the Jews, to complete the Holocaust launched by the Nazis in the Second World War.
These facts are essential to understanding why Israel has waged a defensive war to prevent any further such pogroms. And why this war is key for advancing the struggles of the working class in the region today.
The Hamas thugs were trained, financed and armed by the counterrevolutionary capitalist regime in Iran, backed by Tehran’s Jew-hating “axis of resistance,” including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen and militia forces in Iraq and elsewhere.
Hamas built hundreds of miles of tunnels under Gaza to store weapons and ammunition and provide shelter for its thugs. It also set up command posts and weapons storage depots under schools, hospitals, homes, U.N. warehouses and mosques there.
Hamas knew this would maximize the number of Palestinians killed and injured in battles with Israeli forces, and it would then blame these deaths on Israel. Having plotted for an all-out war for years, Hamas spent not one penny on shelters for the civilians of Gaza. They were more useful as human shields.
The Israel Defense Forces, on the other hand, called off hundreds of attacks in Gaza to avoid civilian deaths and repeatedly used cellphone calls, texts and aerial leafleting to give Palestinians notice to get out of buildings and neighborhoods ahead of planned strikes against Hamas.
Blows dealt to Hamas
In their efforts to defend the existence of Israel as a refuge from Jew-hatred, Israeli forces have dealt enormous blows to Hamas over the last three years, as well as taking military action to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. One atomic bomb the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima could kill the large majority of Jews and others in Israel.
“Our struggle against them is not yet over,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in June.
The U.S. capitalist rulers are the biggest obstacle to completing this task. Their interests don’t include defending Israel as a refuge for Jews. These rulers’ aim is to consolidate control over the vast oil and other natural resources, the markets and labor power of toilers in the Mideast, in order to plunder them and advance against capitalist competitors.
Since President Donald Trump forced Israel to back down from further attacks against Hamas in Gaza last year, the terror group has reasserted its dictatorial grip over Palestinians there, violently preventing a return of earlier substantial protests demanding an end to Hamas rule. And it has no intention of disarming.
Fighting Jew-hatred key for workers
The Jewish question is a class question, and not just a question of Israel and the Middle East, explained Socialist Workers Party leader Dave Prince in the first chapter of the Pathfinder book The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class. “Jew-hatred is a world question. The fight against it is decisive to every working-class battle today against the brutal consequences for humanity of imperialism and its convulsions.”
Ever since the Oct. 7 pogrom, there’s been a torrent of lies slandering Israel and the Jews by the middle-class left, by Democrats from both the party’s liberal and so-called socialist wings, as well as some Republicans and ultrarightists who’ve always hated the Jews. These lies are repeated incessantly by the big-business media, claiming Israel is an “apartheid” state committing “genocide” and carrying out “ethnic cleansing” against Palestinians.
They are stepping up efforts to ostracize Israel from political debate worldwide, to bar its artists from musical and other competitions and sporting events, and to punctuate these moves with physical attacks.
Pro-Hamas forces, as early as the morning of Oct. 7, have hailed the pogrom as a progressive military response to the national struggle of the Palestinians. Nothing could be further from the truth. The mass slaughter of Jews was not an anti-imperialist action. It had nothing to do with advancing the interests of the Palestinian people, or of the exploited and oppressed anywhere in the world.
When given the chance, Gazans have taken the opportunity to speak out, saying their number one obstacle is Hamas and its thugs.
“The deepest abhorrence of the October 7 pogrom is found in the working class in the United States and elsewhere,” wrote Prince in The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms, “not among privileged professionals and the middle classes, or on university campuses, where Jew-hatred is flourishing today.”
The defeat and dismantling of Hamas by the Israel Defense Forces, the only force capable of doing so, would be an important advance for the class struggle in Gaza. It would open the ability of Palestinians to speak out and join in common struggles to forge unity between working people in Israel, Gaza and throughout the Mideast. Through these battles a proletarian revolutionary party can be forged to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and end Jew-hatred once and for all.